Six Nazi SS troops on trial for massacre

On June 10, 1944, the Germans carried out a massacre in Oradour-sur-Glane in central France, just four days after the D-Day landings. They killed 642 men, women and children.

The troops herded them into barns and into a church, blocked the doors and then set fire to the entire town.

Those not killed in the blazes were shot as they tried to flee, but a handful managed to escape.

Dortmund prosecutor Andreas Brendel has opened an investigation of the men earlier based on a precedent set by the trial of John Demjanjuk.

The 91-year-old was convicted in May of 28,060 counts of accessory to murder after a Munich court found he was a guard during the war in the Nazis’ Sobibor death camp in occupied Poland.

It was the first time someone was convicted in Germany on evidence of being only a guard, without evidence of a specific killing.

Mr Brendel said it is known that the six men under investigation, all aged either 85 or 86, were part of the 3rd Company of the 1st Battalion of the “Der Fuehrer” Regiment of the fanatical SS’s “Das Reich” Division.

Oradour-sur-Glane remains a phantom village, with burned-out cars and abandoned buildings left as testimony to its history.

The killings were believed to have been ordered by battalion commander Sturmbannfuehrer Adolf Diekmann in retaliation for the kidnapping of a German soldier by the French Resistance.

He apparently believed the perpetrators were connected to Oradour, but he was killed in action a short time later.

The six men being investigated were all low-ranking. Two have denied being part of the massacre and four were unable for health reasons to give statements.

Mr Brendel said: “Our problem at the moment is finding out how much they knew and what they might have done to facilitate the crime.”